John Henry Newman and His Age

By Owen F. Cummings and John Wester

Many books exist devoted to the life, thought, and writings of Blessed John Henry Newman, the premier Catholic theologian in nineteenth-century England. His influence has been enormous, perhaps especially on Vatican II (1962-65). This book is a Newman primer, and not only a primer about Newman himself, but also about his time and place in church history. It attends to the papacy during his lifetime, his companions and friends, some of his peers at Oxford University, the First Vatican Council (1869-70), as well as some of his writing and theology. It should be especially helpful to an interested reader who has no particular background in nineteenth-century church history or in Newman himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Feb 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532660115

Owen F. Cummings

Owen F. Cummings is Academic Dean and Regents' Professor of Theology at Mount Angel Seminary in Oregon. He is the author of sixteen books and many articles in theological and pastoral journals. He is also a Roman Catholic permanent deacon of the Diocese of Salt Lake City.

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John Henry Newman and His Age

Owen F. Cummings

Foreword by John C. Wester

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JOHN HENRY NEWMAN AND HIS AGE

Copyright © 2019 Owen F. Cummings. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-6009-2

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-6010-8

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-6011-5

Cataloging-in-Publication data:

Names: Cummings, Owen F., author. | Wester, John C., foreword

Title: John Henry Newman and his age / by Owen C. Cummings, with a foreword by Archbishop John C. Wester.

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2019 |  Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: ISBN 978-1-5326-6009-2 (paperback) | ISBN 978-1-5326-6010-8 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-5326-6011-5 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Newman, John Henry, 1801–1890. | Catholicism—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Catholic converts—Great Britain—History. | Oxford movement. | High Church movement.

Classification: LCC BX4705.N5 C85 2019 (print) | LCC BX4705.N5 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 09/17/15

Table of Contents

Title Page

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: Newman’s Pope

Chapter 2: The Oxford Movement

Chapter 3: John Henry Newman (1801–90)

Chapter 4: In Newman’s Circle from Oxford

Chapter 5: In Newman’s Circle from the Oratory

Chapter 6: Newman’s Women!

Chapter 7: Vatican I, 1869–70

Chapter 8: Newman the Poet

Chapter 9: Newman the Preacher

Chapter 10: Looking Back

Appendix: Going Further

Bibliography

With grateful thanks

Dedicated to

Abbot Peter McCarthy, OCSO

And the Trappist Community of Oregon

Foreword

The inspiration for the title of Robert Bolt’s famous play, A Man for All Seasons, came from Robert Whittington, a contemporary of St. Thomas More. Bolt gave this English saint a compliment that has endured through the ages, one that very few can claim. With this latest of his many fine works, Deacon Owen Cummings persuades the reader that Cardinal John Henry Newman is one of those few who deserves such a grand accolade. With his usual gift for thorough research and rich insight, Deacon Cummings explores Newman the man, as well as his theology, his preaching, his poetry, his contemporaries, and the challenges that helped to forge one of the greatest churchmen of the nineteenth century.

Deacon Cummings reveals in the pages that follow that Newman transcended the seasons of time, possessing a solid understanding of the Fathers of the Church as well as early Christian dogmas and at the same time exhibiting a creative spirit that allowed those dogmas to breathe and find new life in the signs of the times. He was a lens that brought doctrine, tradition, and creativity into sharp focus. His important book, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, published in 1845, has had a profound impact on Church life, and its influence can be seen in the writings of the Second Vatican Council and beyond. Little wonder that Newman was invited to be a theological expert at the First Vatican Council.

The seasons of a man’s life are also comprised of the people who influence him, whether intimate friends or ideological adversaries. Newman had both and he never ceased to benefit from and contribute to them all. Cummings has a keen eye for singling out crucial relationships and weaves together a rich tapestry of those people who were part of Newman’s life: from Pius IX to those who were part of Newman’s inner circle in the Oxford Movement, like John Keble, Hurrell Froude, and Edward Pusey. He also explores Newman’s friends from the Oratory in Birmingham and some of the women who played a role in his long life. It is through these relationships that Deacon Cummings gives the reader a peek into the heart of Newman. He was a real gentleman and he cherished his friendships. As the late Archbishop John R. Quinn stated in his book, Revered and Reviled: A Re-examination of Vatican I, Newman had a profound concern for people and was acutely sensitive to what might be injurious or hurtful to them. He had a highly developed pastoral sense. Such concern and care for the feelings of others is something that speaks eloquently to our time. Little wonder that Newman chose for his motto cor ad cor loquitur. When it comes to friendships and matters of the heart, Newman left us an imitable legacy, clearly outlined in this marvelous introduction to his life and thought.

The seasons of Newman’s life can certainly be chronicled by the liturgical seasons in which he preached so eloquently. In his hundreds and hundreds of carefully composed sermons (each of which were certainly beyond the recommended five to eight minutes for today’s homilies!) we see the maturity of his thinking. What his preaching lacked in drama it compensated for in substance. For Newman, the pulpit was truly what the poet George Herbert, in his poem The Windows, called that glorious and transcendent place where God’s love and mercy could shine brightly through the window of his preaching. Cummings does justice to this body of Newman’s work, allowing the Word of God to continue to reverberate in our hearts as it did in Newman’s.

All of the seasons in one’s life are colored and textured by beauty. In this regard, Deacon Cummings underscores the beauty that emanates from Newman’s heart in his poetry. Cardinal Newman chose many themes for his poems, from dreams to solitude to the kindly light. In all of them, we glimpse the heart of the man as Deacon Cummings allows us to savor and taste the richness found in Newman’s poetry, a poetry that expresses meaning that can only be found in verse.

In all of the seasons that make up Newman’s life, one thing is perfectly clear from reading this delightful new book: Newman fixed himself on the heart of Christ. Whether in his theology, his friendships, his pastoral ministry, his preaching, or his poetry, Newman’s love for Jesus Christ is at the center of it all. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis tells us that Cardinal Newman gave us a most practical clue to Christian contemplation when he wrote: Scripture has set [Jesus] before us in His actual sojourn on earth, in His gestures, words, and deeds, in order that we may have that on which to fix our eyes. In season and out, Newman fixed his eyes on Christ, trusting in his kindly light, to lead him one step at a time through all the seasons of life. I believe that Deacon Cummings has succeeded in persuading us that Cardinal John Henry Newman is a man for all seasons. Furthermore, he also leads us to trust that this pastor and preacher, theologian, and poet, is now with Christ the Light, where all seasons and all time are one, and where the night is gone; And with the morn those angel faces smile.

Archbishop John C. Wester

Archbishop of Santa Fe

4000 St. Joseph’s Place NW

Albuquerque, NM 87120

Acknowledgements

In putting together this little book on John Henry Newman the author has incurred many debts, too many to mention by name. But because of the great labor involved, the meticulous care to detail, and our friendship in Christ, I must mention with great gratitude the Most Rev. John C. Wester, Archbishop of Santa Fe, who graciously wrote an introduction, the Rev. Dr. Robin Parry of Worcester, academic editor for Wipf and Stock and a fine theologian in his own right, and Susan Ferguson of Portland, Oregon, my copy-editor on this side of the world. Thank you so much.

Introduction

The Newman scholar Roderick Strange entitles the first chapter in his book on Newman Have You Read Any Newman? It is a great way to begin a book on John Henry Newman. Most people have never read anything by him, and perhaps that is true even of students of theology. Yet, this nineteenth century thinker has so much to offer the contemporary student of theology or even the interested layman, not only in terms of his ideas and his thinking but also through his life. Autobiographies and biographies make compelling reading because we often see something of our own lives and their complexity in the lives of others. Newman is one of those theologians about whose life we know a great deal through his own writings, journals, and letters.

As well as those writings that come from Newman’s own pen, there is a massive number of studies about his life and his theology, and there seems to be no end to them. Newman continues to fascinate. This popularizing little book is written to introduce Newman and his age to those who know little or nothing about him. The first chapter deals with Pope Pius IX, the Pope who served during most of Newman’s life. This chapter provides the background to those issues in the wider church that form the backdrop to Newman. It is followed by a chapter on the Oxford Movement. This is the great movement in the Church of England in which Newman found himself and ultimately from which he moved on when he was received into the Catholic Church. It is important to have some understanding of the richness of this movement. The third chapter is given over to the life of John Henry Newman himself. It tries to capture something of the richness of the man from a variety of viewpoints. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are taken up with Newman’s friends. He had a great capacity for friendship and we can see something of how he relates to them and how they relate to him throughout his journey both in the Church of England and to the Church of Rome. Chapter 6 describes some of the women in Newman’s life. It owes a lot to the scholarship of Joyce Sugg, who was once my colleague at Newman University Birmingham, and who has been studying and publishing on Newman for decades. Chapter 7 considers the First Vatican Council, 1869–70. Newman did not participate in the Council and, while he accepted its decree on papal infallibility, he knew some of the bishops and theologians who attended the Council and he had some important things to add by way of clarification. Chapters 8 and 9 consider Newman as both poet and preacher. Finally, chapter 10 attempts to look back over Newman’s life and what he stood for and to find lessons for the present day.

This is not intended to be a work of high scholarship but rather a modest introduction to John Henry Newman, his times—essentially the long nineteenth century, and some of the people and events whose lives intersected with his. It weaves together history, theology, and spirituality, and my hope is that it will lead the interested reader to Newman himself and to the many fine studies of Newman scholars whose works are cited in the bibliography.

1

Newman’s Pope

Pope Pius IX (1846–78)

Pius was the first pope to identify himself wholeheartedly with ultramontanism, i.e., the tendency to centralize authority in church government and doctrine and the Holy See.

John Norman Davidson Kelly¹

The pontificate of Pius IX . . . witnessed the victory of Ultramontanism over Gallicanism.

Ciaran O’Carroll²

From Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferreti to Pope Pius IX

For the first half of his life John Henry Newman was an Anglican, and for the second half a Roman Catholic. The nineteenth-century Catholicism to which he was drawn was marked by an increasing centralization on the papacy. This papal-centric emphasis is known as ultramontanism, a movement to which Newman found himself increasingly opposed. Pope Pius IX, who was pope during most of Newman’s life, and who was born in 1792, nine years before Newman, identified himself with ultramontanism, both consciously and unconsciously, and that identification spelled the end of Gallicanism—a kind of independence movement in the French Catholic Church—not only in its French form but in any kind of thinking that might be considered critical of the papacy. Pope Pius IX with his ultramontane perspective shaped the excessive papal-centrism of modern times, not only in respect of church governance but also in terms of ecclesiology. His predecessor, Pope Gregory XVI, a known strict conservative in virtually everything, viewed Cardinal Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti as something of an ecclesiastical liberal and said that even Mastai-Ferretti’s cats were liberals. Mastai-Ferretti was elected pope as Gregory’s successor in 1846, taking the name of Pius IX, and he served the church as pope until his death in 1878. It would be fair to say that he moved from a moderate liberalism to an extreme ultramontanism.

Although concerns were raised about his suspected epileptic seizures, he was ordained to the priesthood in 1819, and was sent by Pope Pius VII to Chile and Peru, accompanying Msgr. Giovanni Muzi, the apostolic delegate to those countries from 1823 until 1825. He was the first pope ever to have an experience of South America, although this was his only prolonged trip outside Italy, and arguably his informed awareness of social and political issues was too closely identified throughout his career with Italy and Europe, particularly Catholic Europe. The South American experience, however, stimulated his interest in the missions.³ After he returned from this extended visit to South America, he showed no particular interest in pursuing a papal diplomatic career.

He became Archbishop of Spoleto in 1827, was transferred to Imola in 1832, and was made a cardinal in 1840. While in Imola, Mastai-Ferretti was very popular with the poor, and his charitable activity constantly reduced him to straitened financial circumstances. Far from courting an easy popularity amongst the propertied classes, or the higher clergy, he continued to show, even after he had received the red hat, an independence and liberality of outlook which often cost him the friendship of the larger landholders in his diocese as well as that of the senior government officials.⁴ With this sense of commitment to the poor it is not difficult to understand his attitude to the reformers and progressives of his day, an attitude much less suspicious than many of his peers. He sided with the progressive cohort in the church and was an advocate for political reform. His views had been influenced by the work of the priest-philosopher and politician Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–52), and he was sympathetic to Gioberti’s liberalizing ideas, but E. E. Y. Hales is right to issue this caution: It would be difficult to imagine anything more erroneous than the supposition that Pius was sailing with the wind in adopting liberal policies. He was not a great political thinker . . . but he was certainly not so foolish as to suppose that a liberal policy was going to be easy.⁵ Pius was a moderate liberal, not an extremist reformer politically. And theologically? He would have had a basic awareness of theology—what Owen Chadwick calls [theology] in outline, but also a theology without subtleties.⁶

Pope Pius IX

In 1846, the somewhat liberalizing Mastai-Ferretti was elected Pope as Pope Pius IX. The election of Count Giuseppe Mastai Ferretti as Pope Pius IX in the spring of 1846, after the draconian years of Gregory XVI’s rule, raised the sorts of hopes and expectations aroused in 1978 by the election of Karol Wojtyla after the fraught and depressing final years of Paul VI.⁷ One of the first things he did as pope was to issue an amnesty for political refugees/revolutionaries from the Papal States—that section of Italy that fell under the jurisdiction of the popes—who had been living outside of Italy. They returned in their hundreds. This generous political gesture would create a climate expectant of rapid social and political change in the direction of a unified Italy. The dream of Italian unification had begun to grow towards the end of the eighteenth century, in part stimulated by the French Revolution and the Italian conquests of Napoleon Bonaparte.⁸ Italian unification was everywhere in the air, not only in political circles, so that, for example, it had become the passion of the immensely popular dramatist and poet Vittori Alfieri (1749–1803). Allied to these Italian nationalist aspirations were the constant criticisms of political commentators in Europe. They grumbled that the clock of Europe had stopped in Rome, which was seen to combine feudal pretensions with Renaissance extravagance and whose rigidity and isolation led to stagnation, lamenting that while the world had changed, the church and its leaders had not. The papacy, and their perspective, represented a relic of the past, finding its persistence to the present ironic and unacceptable.⁹ When it comes to the social and economic circumstances of the citizens of the Papal States, it has been pointed out that they were certainly no worse off than the working classes of European democracies, and in some respects were better off. There was no parallel in the Papal States, for example, to the Great Famine in Ireland (1845–52), largely mismanaged by the enlightened British government. However, Anti-papal sentiment at the time would never have acknowledged anything but what they took to be egregious mismanagement in papal government. "The Papal State was a benevolent theocracy. There was no longer a place in the Europe of 1864 for benevolent theocracies, and it may have been in the nature of things that the rising tide of the Risorgimento [the movement to unite Italy] should sweep this State away. But that is not a reason for stigmatizing Pio Nono’s [i.e., Pius IX’s] government as oppressive, or corrupt, or economically backward . . . . "¹⁰ The overly negative opinions of the Papal States were, of course, well known to Pius IX. He could not have been unaware of them. However, there never was a time when Pius considered relinquishing the Papal States. He regarded their political independence as essential, indeed willed by God, to his spiritual leadership as pope. He was never to waver on this point.

At a personal level, no one disagreed with the universally acknowledged fact that Pio Nono was a most charming man. Eamon Duffy writes: He was genial, unpretentious, wreathed in clouds of snuff, always laughing.¹¹ In a more popular book on the papacy Duffy goes somewhat further, but without acknowledging any detailed sources, in describing Pius’s affability and charm: He was devout, kindly, unstuffy and at ease in the company of women (there were vague rumors of romantic irregularities earlier in his life, which didn’t necessarily do him any harm in Italian opinion).¹² Even his critics have to admit that he was most likable. For example, John Henry Newman, no great admirer of the Pope, wrote of him: His personal presence was of a kind that no one could withstand . . . . The main cause of his popularity was the magic of his presence . . . . His uncompromising faith, his courage, the graceful mingling in the name of the human and the divine, the humor, the wit, the playfulness with which he tempered his severity, his naturalness, and then his true eloquence.¹³ Newman was to take exception to what he saw as a growing narrowness of theological and ecclesiological vision, especially in regard to the issue of papal infallibility, and so that makes his generous description of Pius significant.

Apparently, Pius’s sense of fun virtually knew no bounds. On one occasion, a number of Anglican clergymen were visiting Rome and asked for his blessing. Pius pronounced over them, with humor, the prayer for the blessing of incense: May you be blessed by him in whose honor you are to be burned.¹⁴ Pius moved with ease in the company of women. He was an admirer of Queen Victoria, and she sent him a personal letter of sympathy in 1848 at the time of the revolution that took him into exile. In some ways, he seems to have considered himself a progressive Victorian,¹⁵ and may even have entertained the utterly unrealistic idea that Queen Victoria might one day become a Roman Catholic.¹⁶

As a thinker, Pius was no intellectual. Odo Russell, the British ambassador to the Holy See and a man who was genuinely fond of Pius, commented on his amiable but weak mind.¹⁷ In this regard, advisers became all-important, but here too Pius was not blessed with great success. Inevitably, therefore, as Eamon Duffy writes, he was surrounded by people who endorsed and exaggerated his opinions and prejudices: as in the cabinets of Margaret Thatcher, success at the court of Pio Nono depended on being and being seen to be ‘one of us.’¹⁸ He placed too much faith and trust, for example, in Msgr. George Talbot, a converted Anglican priest. Talbot was unstable and reactionary. For example, he sowed suspicions in the Pope’s mind about the orthodoxy and fidelity of Newman. Duffy describes the man in devastating terms: He was certainly devious, feline, wreathed in intrigue, his view of the world and the church a perpetual game of cowboys and Indians, heroes and villains.¹⁹ Somewhat less devastating is Cardinal Manning’s view of Talbot as the most imprudent man that ever lived.²⁰ In 1868, Talbot was removed from the Roman Curia and placed in a mental institution near Paris, where he died in 1886.

Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli (1806–76)

While George Talbot was papal chamberlain, Cardinal Giacomo Antonelli was Secretary of State. Antonelli was born into a family that was wealthy in its own right, but his father, Domenico, realistically recognized that both securing and promoting his wealth in the Papal States would demand an ecclesiastic in his family. Giacomo was to be that ecclesiastic and so in 1823 he was enrolled in Rome’s University of the Sapienza, gradually finding himself fully